Hospitals typically include a variety of devices in patient rooms to enable the patient to communicate with a nurses' station. The hospital room communication devices may include a nurse call button, a microphone, a speaker, and the like. These devices enable the patient, or a nurse in the patient's room, to exchange a variety of emergency and non-emergency information with the nurses' station. These communication devices can be implemented as part of a larger network that services multiple rooms and floors of a hospital. Such networks may implement a TCP/IP protocol in which the hospital room devices are individually addressable, which enables a networked monitoring system to recognize which room a call is coming from.
As will be appreciated, these room communications devices can be used in the event of a patient emergency. As such, it is important that the devices be functional at all times. Where a portion of the communication network (such as, but not limited to, a gateway or a switch) malfunctions, however, continued communication between patient rooms and nurses' stations can be compromised. Current systems address this issue by employing one or more additional Ethernet cables, connected between the room communications devices and the nurses' station, to provide a dedicated mode for the room communications devices. Such redundant Ethernet cabling solutions, however, suffer from the obvious disadvantage that the additional cables are costly and are time consuming to install. Such redundant cable solutions also necessitate the use of an additional intelligent device to connect the additional cable to so that communications can proceed even when the normal network communication mode fails. This further increases hardware and installation costs.